If it happens, we can point to it as a failure of Conservative housing police. Right?

A House of Commons briefing paper released a few days ago asked “Can PRIVATE landlords refuse to let to Housing Benefit claimants? It’s the wrong question and why did they not ask …

Can SOCIAL landlords refuse to let to Housing Benefit claimants

…. as that is precisely what is happening right now and will become the norm due to the Overall Benefit Cap (OBC) policy.

On Monday it reduces by £500 per calendar month outside of London (£25 per month in London) and it means ALL social landlords, that’s council and housing association landlords WILL refuse to house the Housing Benefit claimant in at least 36% of their properties.

The 36% is the number of 3 bed and larger sized properties across social housing that means the benefit tenant can’t afford the rent and the social landlord can’t afford the benefit tenant

In short social landlords will refuse to house 104,000 families per year because they are on Housing Benefit and precisely what MPs failed to look at and the HoC Library failed to look at too! Quite where such benefit tenant families will live is another question entirely!

Like this:

Related

Post navigation

Should this transpire, as it seems it will, then social landlords will come under pressure to ‘release’ these ‘un-affordable’ properties to private enterprise. This may however, only apply to Housing Associations that made transfers in 2000, who were promised fit for use dwellings, in return for transfer. Council retained social housing, albeit at arms length, is still owned and controlled by the tenants via the council, often through a wholly owned company or charity. These should be offered at affordable rents, so something will have to break. I can not see rents reducing to accommodate this. The Tories have been attacking social housing and eroding it’s base at every opportunity for decades. The few (but very strong) laws between them and housing are the only remaining safeguards that still protect the lowest earners accommodation. This is another treacherous example of Tories consideration for it’s citizens in it’s ultimate aim to deconstruct the inclusion off everybody into society. These are, by any modern standards hate crimes by a very, very nasty Tory party.

Yet another total failure of that big decision essential…ie common sense Unfortunately no matter how educated they are this essential ingredient of being a human being is removed from their brain cells at birth and early education. Bright but dim lookalikes. The natives will be restless it’s building up.

You cannot cap benefits at some hypothetical “average wage” level because not all people or families are average – the needs of individuals and families are not all the same. If the right to medical treatment was capped at the level spent on an average patient hundreds of thousands of people would die every year: nobody would have costly surgery: nobody would receive expensive drugs: nobody would get ongoing treatments for chronic ongoing illnesses . And this is the reason why unprincipled governments can get away with introducing caps: able-bodied relatively healthy people who are in work on the minimum age or above look at high benefits that some people received and think, “I’m living on a lot less than that and it’s wrong that others get more than me, or even the same as me, for sitting on their backsides and doing nothing”, oblivious to the fact that the needs of the sick, disabled, large families, and disadvantaged people are greater than those of the fit and the strong and that they themselves would need extra support and help from society if they had an accident, or lost their jobs, or became sick, or were unlucky.

Conflating wages and benefits allow unscrupulous governments to treat people on benefits as if they are receiving wages – which, of course, they are not. It enabled hugely cynical people, like George Osborne, to justify freezing benefit increases for four years by comparing them with stagnant wages and claiming that if wages weren’t rising nor should benefits, which of course is entirely spurious since benefits were already set at a very low level, which should at least have kept pace with inflation in order to maintain a minimum standard as far as a social security safety net was concerned. Plus if there was any linkage between benefits and wages when wages started rising so should have benefits, which of course they didn’t but continued to lose vale in real terms and will continue to until increased in line with inflation again.

The benefit cap is wrong, morally, because help afforded to those facing difficulty is not based on need but on an arbitrary sum set by government, mostly to garner political approval from an electorate that thinks everybody is like everybody else and that millions are making a “lifestyle choice” not to support themselves and enjoy a free ride better than any their labours could reward them with.

Systemic conscious cruelty is the result which inevitably will get worse with every cut, cap, freeze and rise in inflation.

By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. This includes scrolling or continued navigation. more information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.